Reading Struggles of Online Course

E-Learning’s Reading Struggles

As a college student, the textbook fee is always a big burden to bear. So many of my friends and classmates (including myself) choose to buy the online version of the required textbook, which is a much cheaper option when compare to the paper one. Even though I can read this textbook through any of my electronic device anywhere at any time, and that seems really convenience, but one thing I found that truly bothers me is that I can’t take notes or write something on the online textbook. From time to time, whenever I need to write something like my own understanding of that certain paragraph of the online textbook, the only thing I can do is to write it down on a notebook with a sentence that explain what page/paragraph of what textbook this is for. And that did waste a lot of time on scrolling back and forth when I do my reviewing section. Besides that, another problem, or difficulty, I came across is the interruptions and distractions when reading online: E-mails, friends’ messages, update News, etc. These things just easily got my attention and resulted in a 10 to 15 minutes waste of time.

Learning Strategies For Online Courses

E-Learning Strategy

It is hard to do things and get things done on time, as a junior student in college, I certainly understand that struggle. That struggle didn’t just occur on things like: assignment due date and paper submission. Besides, that struggle came to us every morning when we decide whether we should keep staying in bed or get up and start our day. There’re many things externally may prevent us from getting things done on time, things like: time conflicts with multiple tasks, sudden accident, etc. These are certainly something that we cannot control and can caused us a great amount of losses in many aspects other than time. But there’re also many “internally” factors that seems to affect our “on-time” functions, some examples are: Lack of motivation, Skill deficits, Fear of failure, etc. It makes sense if people can’t get things done on time is because of accidents or timing conflicts. But all those internal reasons just don’t add up and make sense to me, if people just decide not to do things base on their own self-interests, then this world will definitely be gone and collapse in just a few seconds.

For me, strategies for time management and task management and all other managements will only work if people have the determination to get things done in the first place, otherwise all the planning will eventually failed. Moreover, strategies need to focus on the reduction of unnecessary actions and time-wasting-activities, and develop an efficiency setting in space, material, etc.

Thoughts on E-Learning

Personal Thoughts on Learning Online Courses

I always have at least 1 course in online format in my schedule every semester. The reason is simple, is all about the “convenience”. After my first semester in college, I realized that as an international student, it’s very hard for me to run a full 18 credits schedule all in a face-to-face lecture format. The normal class time will take down the whole day-time period and force me to do all those textbook-reading and homework in the night-time, and these heavy workload schedule didn’t bring me any good grades and knowledge in that first semester. Therefore, after having a time to discuss this with my adviser, I found out that changing some of the lecture courses into online courses will be the best solution for me. Why is that the case? While, despite the “convenience” characteristic of online course, there’re also other advantages of learning online when compare to the face-to-face format courses: time-saving, schedule flexibility, etc. It is quite obvious that when we learn stuffs through online courses, it’s mostly based upon the students ourselves to decide most of the timing and process of the study, whereas in the face-to-face format it is the teacher that decide all these things.